In other words, the country that is targeted is either not able to detect a hybrid attack or not able to attribute it to a state that might be perpetrating or sponsoring it.

Such obscurity is wittingly created and enlarged by the hybrid actors in order to complicate attribution as well as response. Hybrid attacks are generally marked by a lot of vagueness. The second defining characteristic of hybrid warfare relates to ambiguity and attribution. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, as the ancient military strategist, Sun Tzu, suggested. This remains closely linked to the philosophy of war as well. A key question here is: can there be a war without any direct combat or physical confrontation taking place? With hybrid warfare permeating inter-state conflicts, it is possible to answer this in the affirmative. The costs and risks are markedly less, but the damage is real. It is much more feasible to, let’s say, sponsor and fan disinformation in collaboration with non-state actors than it is to roll tanks into another country’s territory or scramble fighter jets into its airspace. Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper, and less risky than kinetic operations. War becomes elusive as it becomes difficult to operationalise it. This means that it is hard to identify or discern the war threshold. First, the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. Furthermore, there are two distinct characteristics of hybrid warfare. The objective of conflating kinetic tools and non-kinetic tactics is to inflict damage on a belligerent state in an optimal manner. These instruments or tools are blended in a synchronised manner to exploit the vulnerabilities of an antagonist and achieve synergistic effects. To put it simply, hybrid warfare entails an interplay or fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion. Nevertheless, the concept furnishes us with key insights into contemporary and future security and defence challenges. It has been subjected to a lot of criticism for lacking conceptual clarity, being merely a catch-all phrase or a buzzword, and not brining anything distinctly new to policy debates.

Hybrid warfare remains a contested concept and there is no universally agreed definition of it. Second, Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and achieved its objectives by virtue of conflating “deniable” special forces, local armed actors, economic clout, disinformation, and exploitation of socio-political polarisation in Ukraine. First, in 2005, two US military officials wrote about the “ rise of hybrid wars” and emphasised the combination of conventional and unconventional strategies, methods, and tactics in contemporary warfare as well as the psychological or information-related aspects of modern conflicts. The most prominent limited war writers also assume a form of rationality on the part of opponents that logically cannot be expected.Before we delve into the concept, it is important to highlight that hybrid warfare in the contemporary era became increasingly popular in policy debates following two important developments. Existing ideas on limited war are also of little use and must be replaced because they are built upon a Cold War situation that no longer exists, based upon poor and inconsistent definitions, and take as their archetypal case study the Korean War, which is misunderstood by those who write about it. We must also be careful to avoid jargon and unclear terms such as “total war” because these are based upon undefinable concepts, such as the means used. Military strategy is an important part of this and is supported by operations, which then dictate battles and tactical responses. The political and military leaders should then develop a grand strategy for fighting the war, meaning using all of the elements of national power in pursuit of the objective. The basis of our approach is to start with the political aim. To do this we have to repair how we think about all wars. The first thing we have to do is fix how we think about limited war.

Total war definition